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Most faculty dedicated, hard-working

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Tuesday February 11, 2014 6:42 AM

The Wednesday letter “Raise for OU professors keeps costs high” from Ron Brown presented a
popular but ill-informed view of faculty in higher education. Simply, Brown suggests that faculty
salaries are to blame for the high cost of college.

And believe me, with two children in college, I, too, would like some answers, but faculty and
their earnings are not the problem.

Recently,
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported the findings of the Delta Cost Project, a
nonpartisan nonprofit group, which uncovered the real culprit: “new administrative positions.” And
these aren’t just a few more advisers or recruiters. “The number of full-time faculty and staff
members per professional or managerial administrator has declined 40 percent, to around 2.5 to 1.”
That's a lot of administration.

Add to that the fact that more and more universities use part-time, not full-time, faculty, and
we have a textbook definition of bureaucratic bloat.

Brown also characterized faculty load as an eight-month job and suggested that if faculty
members really loved their students, their jobs and their country, they wouldn’t need raises.

I’m not sure why loving your job means you don’t deserve to receive pay for that job, but Brown
is completely misinformed about faculty work load. Most faculty members I know love what they do,
and because of that, they spend 60-hour work weeks teaching, meeting with students, preparing
classes, researching, publishing, making connections to help their students find jobs, and much
more.